


A Waltz for the End of the World

by Apple



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Angst, Apocalypse, Desperation, Drinking to Cope, F/M, Implied Future Character Death, Pairing if you Squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-20 07:26:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/884574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apple/pseuds/Apple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gods damn him for a desperate man, but her babble plucked some chord in him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Waltz for the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> Rated for vague violence and (underage for us, but not for the FEA universe) drinking. The rating is also somewhat for Inigo’s mouth, which mostly stays in the usual Fire Emblem levels but veers into Sully territory at least once. I'll probably be cross-posting this to FFnet when I feel less lazy. 
> 
> There are minor spoilers for the Future’s Past DLCs; although this fic takes place in the ruined future Lucina—called the main future from this point on to make this A/N less annoying for me to write—came back from. Specifically that the Fire Emblem and one of the gems was destroyed in main!Lucina’s timeline, preventing the kids from trying to perform the Awakening ritual.

The first one she finds is Inigo. Unlike some of their group, Olivia’s son has not bothered trying to hide in the wake of their last disastrous effort, has not gone to ground with a group of refugees somewhere to watch the sky with sword in hand. She slips into the shadowed, sodden tavern and hears his voice slur her by name, her title, and the old wooden walls creak from the force of the crowd within laughing and laughing and laughing as only the drunk and the dying can laugh.

They are all dead men in Grima's eyes—might as well wait for the dragon with a mug in each hand. If the witty fellow at the table thought the Princess had come to wait with them, well, wasn't that just one more thing to toast to?

Lucina hauls a giggling, ruddy-faced barmaid with ripped shirt off of Inigo's knee, feeling something cold curdle in her belly at the way the girl giggles as she hits the ale-stained floor. Men and women alike laugh and jeer around her as she hoists the dancer's son up out of the rickety chair by his neck. A few make suggestions her well-bred ears might have flushed to hear, if such things had mattered to Lucina anymore.

These are her people. Her father's people. The people she had failed as surely as if she had put torch to their homes and villages and children with her own hands. A dozen, two dozen maybe even more. There must have been half of Ylissetol gathered in this filthy place; come to drink and die in the shadows of her father's ruined castle.

Lucina has no right to hold her head any higher than theirs. No right—only an old sword and a prayer.

He laughs at her too, the cowardly arse, and she wrinkles her nose at the alcohol-soaked breath. She sways for a moment, dizzy, while his vocal cords rattle against her palm. "Never knew you went for this kind of thing, Lucy."

 _"You can save them. You can save them_ all _… but not alone."_

Her mind crystallizes; disgust, shame, purpose. She slams a few coins down on the sticky tabletop, far more than the wyvern piss this place serves is worth, and shoves a path through the reeking throng. A clumsy hand brushes her sleeve, a man calls for 'the ladyship' to join them in drinking to her dear departed parents, the woman on the floor clings to Inigo's leg and won't stop giggling, but eventually they're out in the night and Lucina is holding her captive drunk's head down in a stagnant horse trough. The thing in her chest is as cold as the water as her old playmate thrashes, one wild fist just barely missing her ear.

She yanks his head up and out, tracing an arc of water in the darkness. He splutters, turns to her red-faced and raging. She shoves him back down again, ignoring his flailing as she keeps a wary eye cast about for the thieves and the Risen who pick off her people by night and slaughter them by day. Some of the water splashes against her face, cold and acrid on her lips.

Again and again, the princess lets him up into the air, lets him form the beginnings of a reaction before slamming his head back down.  He tries to shout at her once, twice, but the splashing is already noise enough and the last of the Exalted line knows that noise is death as sure as any blade. Her count is silent but steady each time.

When she yanks Inigo up out of the stagnant water and he focuses on heaving in deep, greedy breaths instead of trying to scream her down or strike her, Lucina judges him 'sober enough' and shoves him away from the trough, away from her. His back smacks painfully against the wall, and when he slides down to the mud his dunkings have spread across the ground he leaves a swath of sodden wood above. Lucina turns away, not from pity at the heaving gasps from behind her but to dig through a small pack that had caught her eye while dragging Inigo through the door. As with most of her city, the stable empty of all signs of beasts and keepers save the trough and a few forgotten belongings. Horses, pegasi, wyverns had gone to the army, or to stewpots after the Grimleal's annihilation of all but a lucky few farming villages.

 _"They're trying to starve us."_ Aunt Lissa's voice, still so very clear, had it truly only been a year since Lucina had last heard it?

Maribelle's laugh, dry and skittering as brown leaves. _"No, darling—they're just trying to kill people."_

"Bitch," Inigo wheezes, and just like that Lucina is back in the _now_. She turns her face towards her old playmate. The chill in her eyes is so absolute that it might have sobered him up on the spot if he'd bothered to look back in the tavern.

He meets those eyes squarely.

Lucina might have smiled, in the lack of light Inigo neither knows nor cares. She throws an old cloak at him, viciously pleased at how scratchy and rough the fabric turned out to be. He's so startled he catches it and holds it tight.

"Come on." She turns away, already catching the distant _shhhhh_ ing that could come from the walk of a corpse.

Inigo's ears are no less keen after a lifetime of war, but the blank fury in his eyes as he grabs her by the arm hard enough to bruise tells her he just can't care anymore. He opens his mouth again, and she feels her own practiced speech swelling up within her.

"I can save them." the words of a desperate girl tumble from her lips, not the words of a princess or a commander or a warrior, but the words of a child with no-one left to hold her. The words of somebody for whom _can_ means _will_ , means _must_. "All of them. I can stop Grima. _I can save everyone_."

He stares at her, seeing something strange and familiar in her eyes, something he thought gone when their plans for the Awakening ritual ended with Sable shattered. Useless, and with it the other gems, the Fire Emblem, every sword and spear and soldier and prayer they could have possibly mustered up. Everything, useless. Was it any wonder he'd decided to see things through to a drunken end?

They can hear the moaning, now.

"You're crazy." Gods damn him for a desperate man, but her babble plucked some chord in him. The barking accusation he'd meant to fire streams out instead as the hiss of someone who wants to live. Someone who wants to think in terms of tomorrow and the next day instead of now and before.

Now it is Lucina's turn to laugh, and the sound is as sharp and bright as Falchion. The sacred blade is ready in her grasp as she turns towards the corner where the first Risen shambles into view. Over her shoulder, framed by her father's hair, the sword's glow catches like fire in her eyes.

"At least I'm sober."

She surges forward and he finds himself reaching for his own belt, the almost-unfamiliar will to live crackling in the back of his head. She's sweeping and weaving as he hasn't seen her do in years, not like she means it at least. The princess isn't fighting—she's _dancing._

He's swearing by the time his mind catches up to his feet, to the hands that have yanked the sword from his belt and shoved it into the back of a man now twice-dead. The Risen's claws brush harmlessly through Lucina's hair as it falls, giving him a glimpse of a neck so pale it seems to glow as surely as Falchion. Just a glimpse, a flicker—the princess is already turning again even as her sword cleaves another rotting body at the waist. She bares her teeth in exultation, and Inigo hears her laughing again. _Godsdamned crazy-arse Princess—!_

He could've smacked her if they both weren't already back in the throes of the battle, parry and pirouette and pierce. But Gods, Inigo never could resist a good dance partner.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, Inigo, why are you such a philanderer? Considering that at the time I wrote this I was finishing a ChromxOlivia run-through, I’m still not entirely sure how the vague pairing implications snuck in. Inigo and Lucina were not intended to be siblings in this fic, though.
> 
> My FEA headcanon is that the artifacts were lost while the kids tried to retrieve them, due to the fact that, in the first FP DLC, main!Noire recognizes the inn where FP!Noire and the rest were trapped been and recalls that her group had decided against staying the night there. This means that, in the main future, the kids had been sent out on a mission as they were in Future’s Past, a mission that took them over the border and into Plegia, on the same route that presumably led them to one of the gems. So, for the purposes of this fic, one of the groups of kids—Severa, Laurent, Gerome, and of course everyone’s favorite wyvern, to be specific—ran into trouble on the way back that resulted in the destruction of the gem and Emblem. The other groups made it back without even the problems that their FP counterparts encountered, only to find out that they had risked their lives for nothing. Further headcanon is that the bitter and dejected Lucina, attempting to do her equally-despondant friends one last kindness for their efforts—as well as possibly preserving their lives for just a little longer, told them they were free to go wherever they wanted after they returned. Therefore, when Naga offered Lucina the chance to change the past, she would have had to go and round everybody back up.


End file.
